Most founders can't tell you the moment they decided to build. Vedang Patel can. He was 23, a finance analyst with IIM seats in hand, and he looked at the MBA-holder sitting next to him in office and asked himself one question: "Is that what I want to do?"

The resounding no from every section of his brain, and the ₹5.25 lakh he and his co-founders had between them is what became The Souled Store. ₹1000 crore in revenue, 

₹150–200 crore in profit, an NSE bell on the way.

In this episode, Avnish and Vedang sit with three questions sent in by aspiring founders:

1. How do you actually validate an idea?
2. How do you separate polite encouragement from real market demand?
Brand or revenue first?
3. They also talk about the part most founders won't: the $10 million Vedang got "lost in frameworks" with, the 15-20 CR in personal-guarantee debt, and how exponential's cheque pulled him back.

Chapters 

00:00 Cold open
01:30 From a cupboard of t-shirts to ₹1000 crore
03:30 The Sunday-Monday test
06:30 "She cried for days"
08:30 Risk vs Recklessness
11:00 Q: How do I validate my idea?
13:30 ₹5.25 lakh, no money for movies
15:30 Discounted PMF is false PMF
17:00 Q: Polite encouragement or real demand?
20:30 The empty chair of the customer
24:30 When the $10 million came in
27:30 "Maybe I should be inspired by Neera Modi"
30:30 Q: Brand or revenue first?
32:00 A brand is what the customer expects
35:30 Why he never left Bombay
38:30 The ESOP wall and the 5-10-85 rule
41:30 "Don't overthink. Start."

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LinkedIn -   / z47-vc

India's AI moment is louder than its rank. 100M+ ChatGPT users. #2 globally in usage. Still 76th in the world on per capita penetration. So what's actually happening on the ground?

In this episode of Z47 Moments, Vikram Vaidyanathan and Ashwin Raguraman (Head of AI, walk through The India AI Edge: a three-month primary research effort by Z47, OpenAI, and Zinnov. The report draws on first-party ChatGPT data from OpenAI and interviews with 100+ CXOs across India's largest enterprises, traditional businesses, and emerging companies.

They unpack:

• 
  Why India's AI map looks nothing like its tech map: Delhi #1 in GDP penetration, Ahmedabad in the top 5 for coding, Assam 3x the national average on education usage
• The flip nobody saw coming: in mid-2024, Gen Z (18–24) overtook 25–34 as India's dominant AI cohort, and now drives nearly half of all ChatGPT messages
• Work-to-non-work: how India went from 60% work usage to 65% non-work usage in a year,  and what that says about penetration 
• The four enterprise adoption archetypes: Tinkerer, Democratizer, Transformer, Enforcer, and why ~1 in 4 Indian enterprises is stuck in the wrong one 
• The trillion-dollar gap to Viksit Bharat, and the specific role AI would have to play to close it 
• The four pillars India needs to scale: compute (200–250 MW today → 7 GW needed by 2030), talent, data (and the "data colony" question), and the companies actually being built

To read the full report, go to:

The India AI Edge Website:
Link to report:

Chapters

00:00 — Cold Open: The Stats That Set the Frame
00:49 — Inside the Report: 100M Users, 100+ CXOs, OpenAI Data
02:14 — How AI Is Redrawing India's Map
04:59 — The Gen Z Takeover
11:24 — Work to Non-Work: India's Usage Flip
15:01 — Enterprise AI: The Four Archetypes
25:27 — The Enforcer Trap (And How to Escape It)
33:21 — Can AI Close India's Trillion-Dollar Gap?
37:22 — Compute, Talent, Data, Companies: The Four Pillars
47:15 — India's AI Ecosystem & Closing

What do you do when the resume is perfect but the work isn't yours yet?
Utkarsh Gupta grew up in the Dainik Jagran family in Kanpur, a thirty-person joint family, a media legacy, and a grandfather who once left an entire newspaper page blank during the Emergency and went to jail for it. 

By thirty-two, Utkarsh had built his own answer: Comet, the Indian sneaker brand that put a mango shoe and a rubber-ducky shoe into the world before it ever touched a marketplace.

In this episode, Avnish Bajaj and Utkarsh sit with the questions most founders never say out loud:

Was the MBA real, or was I procrastinating? 

1. How do you build your own legacy when one's already been handed to you? 

2. How do you tell persistence apart from stubbornness when the first launch sells two pairs? 

3. When everyone says list on Myntra, why wait two and a half years?

A masterclass in brand building, told as a confession.

Chapters

0:00 Introduction
0:50 Growing up in Kanpur's joint family
1:13 How Dainik Jagran started on a cycle in 1940
2:09 Why he left a media dynasty to build his own thing
4:47 Doon School changed everything at age 11
6:20 Grandfather's lesson: don't be afraid to scale
11:50 How Chicago's sneaker culture sparked Comet
13:31 Creating your own surface area of luck
14:55 Finding co-founder Dushyant
23:24 The 4-pillar brand strategy that built Comet
27:09 Why they waited 2.5 years before joining Myntra
28:55 The Mango shoe sold 2 units in 4 days — they persisted anyway
31:40 3 metrics every founder should track
41:46 Building the sole from scratch (4-5 moulds, 6 months)
43:02 Creasing problem: sourced a secret material from Korea
46:12 Instagram → Stores → Myntra: the distribution sequence
49:43 Exclusive reveal: the Rubber Ducky drop (May)

Do you need an original idea to start a company? Do you need to be a consumer of your category? Do you need the "right" co-founders?
Manish Taneja was none of those things. He grew up in Faridabad a self-described "frog of his own well." He went to IIT and "felt very small." He became a banker, then an investor, then started a beauty company with two other male engineers, with no female co-founder, and no personal stake in the category. He still built Purplle into one of India's largest beauty platforms.
In this episode of Unstarted, Avnish Bajaj and Manish sit down to work through the questions that every founder without a clear edge asks themselves:

1. Do you need an original idea, or is it okay to be a "copycat entrepreneur"?  When VCs tell you your team is missing something 

2. Do you fix the weakness or back your strength? – How do you find a wedge in a category where everyone else has more money, more experience, and more insider knowledge? 

3. What do you do when your ego won't let you leave — and is that the thing keeping you in the game? 

4. How do you build responsibly without losing your edge?

Manish's answer to all of it, in the end, comes down to two lines: back your strengths, and build responsibly. This conversation is about how he got there.

Chapters

00:00 The $100 million mistake
01:55 Faridabad, the frog in the well
03:03 Feeling small at IIT, and the speech that changed everything
05:31 Lehman, Avendus, and the long apprenticeship
08:52 "I was the original copycat entrepreneur"
12:58 The feedback from Matrix: no woman co-founder
14:54 Why beauty, and why now
17:52 Dabau early: the rosemary water playbook
22:00 How Purplle won Kerala (and met the priests)
26:02 The internal compass, and saying no to Thrasios
28:53 Why your ego won't let you leave
30:36 Why he built in Bombay
33:17 The IPO question
35:49 Build responsibly

What do you do with the regret of being right too early?

Aakrit Vaish started Haptik in 2013: an AI chatbot company nine years before ChatGPT. By 2016 he knew the market wasn't ready. He kept going anyway. In 2019 he sold to Reliance Jio. In November 2022, he watched the world finally catch up to the thesis he'd carried for a decade and for a few weeks, sat with the sentence: "This should have been me."

Today he's co-founder of Activate, an AI-native VC firm running with two partners, one employee and seven agents, and an advisor on the India AI Mission. In this episode, Avnish Bajaj sits down with a founder who has rejected him more than once, and asks the questions most founders quietly carry:

1. How do you know whether you're early, late, or correctly timed?
2. Why do you keep going when the rational move is to stop?
3. When the world eventually proves you right, what do you do with the grief?
4. In AI today, what does it actually mean to be in the 99th percentile — globally, not locally?
5. How does a high-agency founder stay ahead when the tools keep rewriting the job?
6. What Aakrit lands on: market timing matters, but identity matters more. 
7. Mission over everything else. And the only advice he gives, seven times a day, to anyone who'll listen: have agency. Build. Don't wait.

Chapters

00:00 Why Did You Let ChatGPT Happen?
02:30 Welcome to Unstarted — Introducing Aakrit Vaish
04:00 Growing Up in Juhu — Normal Mumbai Business Family
06:30 UIUC, PayPal Mafia & Moving to Silicon Valley
09:00 Why He Came Back to India at 27
11:00 What Was Haptic? India's First AI Chatbot Company
14:00 The Alexa Moment That Started It All (London 2012)
18:00 How Founders Can Know If They Are Too Early or Too Late
23:00 2016 — He Knew It Was Too Early. He Kept Going Anyway
27:30 Fear of Failure vs Fear of Not Trying Hard Enough
31:00 The Pull vs Push Test — The Clearest PMF Signal
35:00 Why He Sold Haptic to Reliance
38:30 ChatGPT Launched. His First Reaction Was Personal
43:00 "Should That Have Been Me?" — The Honest Answer
47:00 From Reliance to India AI Mission to Activate VC
51:00 How to Know Which Problem Is Worth Solving With AI
55:30 99th Percentile or Nothing — The New Bar for AI Founders
59:00 Why AI in India Is the Most Ignored Opportunity
1:03:00 Anthropic vs OpenAI — Two Different Strategies Explained
1:07:00 Voice AI, FinTech & How GDP Will Actually Grow
1:11:00  The K-Shift — GDP Growth at the Cost of Inequality

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

What happens when you spend 13 years building something, and for most of those years, the people around you think it's not going to work out?
Jaydeep Barman left a gilded career at McKinsey's London office to bet on a single roll shop in Pune. What followed was a decade-plus journey through India's costliest real estate market, the invention of an entirely new category (cloud kitchens — before anyone called it that), and the slow, painful work of staying in the game while companies that started years after him became unicorns overnight.

In this conversation, Avnish and Jaydeep wrestle with:

1. How do you find the one insight nobody else has, and trust it when the world disagrees?

2. What do you do when your investors mentally write you off?

3. Why does every real innovation at Rebel come from the moments they were closest to shutting down?

4. How do you build a team that stays for 13 years, through the pain, the doubt, and the long wait?

5. This is a conversation about what it actually costs to stay in the arena longer than everyone expects you to, and what that buys you that nothing else can.

Chapters: 

00:00 The reality of startup comparison & investor pressure
01:30 Why we didn’t pivot to food delivery (despite the hype)
02:30 From McKinsey to starting a food business
04:10 The first roll shop: how Fasos began
09:00 Learning the business & why curiosity matters most
11:20 Insight v/s timing: finding your “right to win”
13:40 Building a cloud kitchen breakthrough
17:30 Founder mentality vs CV mentality
20:00 Hiring, ownership & building real culture
24:50 Performance vs culture: who stays, who leaves
27:20 Rock bottom moments: running out of money & pushing through

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

What does it take to fix the most broken system in America — from the outside?

Ajay and Aniket, co-founders of Coral AI, had zero healthcare experience when they started. What they had was a burning problem, a one-way plane ticket to the US, and a relentless drive to understand healthcare from the ground up — visiting 17 cities in 30 days, becoming interns, and reading thousands of faxes doctors still send in 2026.

In this episode of Zee47 Moments, Ashwin and Vikram sit down with the founders to unpack how Coral is using AI to eliminate the administrative chaos of patient referrals — cutting weeks of back-and-forth down to minutes — and how they're building one of the most AI-native companies in healthcare.

🔍 What we cover:

• Why 40% of primary care visits result in a referral — and how that process is broken
• How fax machines still run US healthcare in 2026
• The technology behind going from 80% to 99.1% accuracy on medical documents
• Why Epic and OpenAI can't solve this problem — but Coral can
• Winning head-to-head against a competitor that raised $100M+
• The "forward deployed engineer" model and why it's not services
• Building a lean, 10x team of future founders

Coral just raised $12.5M led by Zee47. This is their story.

─────────────────────────────
CHAPTERS

0:00 17 days to get a scan
2:22 Picking healthcare with zero healthcare background
4:48 17 cities in 30 days and the Mamba mentality
8:26 Inside the fax machine: how a US referral actually works
14:16 Getting to 99% accuracy (and why 95% isn't enough)
20:48 Beating a competitor with 10x the money
24:56 $100K to $500K without a sales team
28:07 The 10X-only team and the FTE model done right
33:40 Failure, rapid fire, and what's next

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Sanket Shah started thinking about business at 17. His first idea was putting ads on Mumbai's auto-rickshaws. The government said no. He went to Mantralaya three times, met the Chief Minister, got sent to the transport commissioner, and received government letters at home for four years.
He got 4 rickshaws approved.

Twenty-something years later, he's the founder of Invideo — a video creation platform operating at serious scale, with under 100 people. 
And right now, he's stopped looking at his revenue numbers entirely. He has two people running the existing business. He is fully allocated to what comes next.

In this conversation with Avnish Bajaj, Sanket talks about why you can't optimise your way through a ceiling — and what it actually costs to do something drastic. He talks about the one conversation he had in San Francisco where he and his co-founder both knew they had to change course, chose not to, and paid for it all year.

Founder questions tackled in this episode: 

1. What's the difference between an L1 insight and the insight that actually can't be copied? 
2. When does persistence become stubbornness? How do you know which side you're on? 
3. How do you talk to customers without asking leading questions — and what do you do with what you hear? 
4. When everyone's going agentic, how do you actually stand out?

Recorded in association with Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM), ahead of Mumbai Tech Week 2026  May 29–30 at Jio World Convention Centre. Register at mumbaitechweek.com.

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Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Harsh Jain built Dream11 from a family business detour and a love of fantasy football into a company that sponsored every IPL team, sent athletes to the Olympics, and had 300 million users.
Then the government effectively ended the business he'd spent 15 years building.

This conversation isn't about the rise. It's about what happens after the nuclear bomb falls — how you grieve something you loved, how you decide whether to fight or pivot, and how you keep 1,000 people from walking out the door.

The questions Avnish and Harsh wrestle with:

1. Do you really need an original idea, or do you need to be obsessed with a problem?

2. What's the difference between being in love with your company and just being attracted to the outcome?

3. How do you keep going after 150 investor rejections — and is "keep going" always the right answer?

4. What do you do when the nuclear bomb falls on everything you built?

5. Can culture actually survive catastrophe, or does it only exist in the good times?

In the end culture is the only thing that scales. Not the product or funding. The team and whether you built something worth staying for.

YouTube Chapters
00:00 The neighbour who built Dream11 
05:09 Love vs. lust: the only thing that keeps you going 
06:39 Q1: Do you really need an original idea? 
10:27 150 rejections: the napkin, the car ride 
18:37 Q2:How to know if you actually have product-market fit 
22:03 Culture is the founder's DNA 
27:43 The nuclear bomb falls 
32:54 What happens after you grieve together 
39:45 Why Harsh never left Mumbai 
41:21 — What Mumbai Tech Week is actually for 
44:10 — B talent. A culture. One big problem.

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

OpenClaw went from zero to more GitHub stars than React, a library that took a decade to build that following, in 60 days. One graph, vertical, like nothing the developer community had ever seen.

When Z47’s founder, Avnish Bajaj saw that graph, something shifted.
Six months earlier, the at Z47 had sat down to look at the velocity of AI deal-making, the valuations, the volume of capital flooding in, and called it a bubble. 

The consensus was clear: enterprise adoption would lag, the economics wouldn't close, and the correction would come.Then that graph happened. Then agentic AI happened. Then self-healing code happened. And the thing everyone assumed would lag — enterprise adoption — is now about to explode.

Avnish sits down with Rajinder on Intelligent Indians to work through what changed, what it means, and what every founder and operator needs to do right now before the window closes.

The conversation covers:

1. Why the bubble call was wrong, and the specific moment that broke the consensus thesis

2. The AI Agency vs. Mastery K-curve an what it means for your trajectory
Answering the question “Will AI take my job?”

3. How India is positioned to build AI services

4. What AI-native actually means (And no, it is not using ChatGPT) 

5. A live demo of Avnish's WhatsApp-based agent Zen

Chapters 

00:00 "I Called a Bubble. I Was Wrong 
06:15 The Moment That Changed Everything: OpenClaw and the Enterprise Unlock 
08:16 The K-Curve: Why AI Won't Take Your Job — But Someone Else Will 
14:29 India's Real Opportunity (It's Not What You Think) 
22:16 What Founders Should Actually Do Right Now 
27:48 Live Demo: Avi's AI Agent "Zen" 
33:24 I've Been Waiting 35 Years. It's Finally Here

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Most people know what they want. The problem is they keep waiting for certainty that never comes.

Oolka founder, Utkrishta Kumar built India's first just-in-time fulfilment network at 27, helped scale Meesho through one of India's biggest social commerce pivots and then left before the IPO. Not because he had to, but because the regret of not starting felt heavier than the risk of failing.

In this episode, Avnish and Utkrishta work through the questions early founders actually get stuck on:

1. How do I know I'm ready to start up?
2. How do you find PMF and is tracking PMF enough?
3. How do I build an AI product that ChatGPT can't just replace tomorrow?
4. If I've already made money, why does failure still terrify me?
5. The conversation lands somewhere honest: you won't see the whole road. 6. You just need to be okay with the fog

A new episode of Unstarted - every Thursday

00:00  Leaving before the IPO
00:56  Introduction: the one question every aspiring founder is asking 
01:55  Growing up risk-averse 
04:54 Q1: How do you know if starting up is the right move? 
07:12 How to build a founder's operating system without an MBA 
11:43 Q2: How do I know if I've reached PMF? 
13:47 What Oolka does — and why every credit problem is individual 
16:51 Why he left Meesho before the IPO — and the fear money doesn't fix 19:58 Q3: How do you build with AI without being replaced tomorrow? 
26:49 Final advice: more than 70% never fire the bullet